Thomas McGonigle | St. Patrick's Day: Another Day in Dublin / 2016

out to

by Douglas Messerli

 

Thomas McGonigle St. Patrick’s Day: Another Day in Dublin (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016)

Thomas McGoingle’s fiction of 2016, which I finally finished reading the other day, concerns the narrator’s last days in Dublin, with memory side-trips to Sophia, Bulgaria, and New York. In one sense, the plot consists simply of a long pub-crawl outlined the work’s very first pages:

 

                     Starring (obviously) in the Russell Hotel

                     Walking to Grogan’s by way of Stephen’s Green and

                         Neary’s Pub

                     In Grogan’s

                     Out on the Street to the Memorial by the Grand Canal

                          and Baggot Street Bridge

                     To Rathmines and Rathgar

                     Starting Out Again

                     Taken Apart

                     McDaids

                     En Route

                     Again, Grogan’s

                     To the Party

                     The Corn Exchange

 

The day, importantly, is St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday imported from “New York and points west,” performed by shivering girls on floats in a cold and slightly snowy day in Dublin. 

     If this all sounds somewhat desultory, even meaningless—and it is—the journey through parties and pubs is also a rich account of Dublin life through the mind and memories of its rather worn out and presumably always slightly drunk narrator. And that, along with the work’s associations of Joyce’s writings, and brief references to Yeats, Ezra Pound, Julien Green, Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, and other writers along the way, provides this book with a density of emotional heft that pulls the reader through its pages, and, despite the desolation of the experience, helps him to care for the narrator, who through the beneficence of a father who refused to spend any of his retirement savings, has been able to make these voyages, along with side trips to Scotland, Venice, Bulgaria and elsewhere, possible.

     Although the narrator has been a long while in Ireland, leaving several times only to return, and has attended University College, Dublin, his ties with the Irish friends—with roots in Ireland, the USA, and, through the narrator’s wife, Bulgaria—seem tenuous at best, and help us to realize just how isolate the Irish truly are, and how dissociated our “hero” is.

     Americans tromp through the landscape, many, as the narrator jokes, to pay homage to their ancestor’s graves, but he has no such intentions; his voyage through the pubs is simply to find friends and, perhaps, if he’s lucky—as he is this day—to get invited to a party where he might find an interesting young girl or, if he is truly fortunate, to have a sexual encounter.

      His actual situation, however, is laid out early in the work, when a girl “bothers” to speak with him, only to make it clear she’ll be laughed at by her friends for doing so; he’s pointless, she declares, since he’ll soon be going away.

      Even his friends refer to him as “the American delegation,” and at another bar two men describe the general attitude about Americans:

 

                    O, those noisy Americans, what a crazy bunch of

                    people, not at all like I would expect, but on the

                    hand, tie some feathers to their heads and put a

                    rifle in their hand and they would do a good job of

                    impersonating your red Indian in the cowboy pictures.

 

At another moment he is criticized for having, long ago, read a section of Ginsberg’s Howl at the university, and is characterized as just another American reading all those newspapers and opinion polls. Even at the party to which he is finally invited, he is made to feel the outsider. Dublin is clearly a world of those who belong and those who don’t, or those who will soon be, like are narrator obviously, missing.

 

    While giving due to all of the great writing ghosts that haunt the Dublin streets, Yeats, Beckett, Joyce, and lesser names, the narrator shows us, perhaps, why many of them couldn’t stay in their homeland. It’s not just the poverty—indeed the modern Dublin, despite its greasy pub food, its decaying hotels, and its general dreariness—even in this fiction of a former decade, is growing rich, its streets filled with new constructions.

      Yet the author makes it clear that its very attractions are also its horrible failings. I too have crawled through several Dublin pubs (albeit only on two nights) and watched a couple of giggling girls eating a large bowl of what appeared to be simply gravy which, when they were asked what they were eating, was confirmed. What McGonigle’s fiction confirms is simply the bourgeois provinciality of that famed city. And by the end of the work, we perceive the slow trail that the narrator makes through some of the city’s many bars to be not just a voyage of a recording perceiver but as almost a physician, determined through humor and grit to help cure the cynical citizens of his territory.

       If St. Patrick’s Day doesn’t truly offer a positive solution for the individuals who populate its pages, the voyage itself becomes an anguished possibility…both a way on to move on to something different or, if nothing else, to find a way out. The narrator’s friend Liddy (a character based on the true life Irish-born poet who moved to the US and published numerous books there, dying in Milwaukee in 2008) is soon to return to the US, and the narrator himself will, as he notes, soon be “out to….”—the “to” here possibly being a homonym for “too,” “also.”

 

Los Angeles, March 14, 2017

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (March 2017).